How language shapes the way we think

I'll start with an example from an aboriginal community in Australia that I had a chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. And what’s cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre they don't use words like left and right. And instead everything is in cardinal directions, north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like "Oh, there's an ant on your Southwest leg." Or "move your cup to the north north east a little bit." In fact the way that you are saying „hello“ in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, „Which way are you going?“. […] In fact people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better then we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans are worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse. „Oh, we don’t have magnets in our beaks or in our scales.“ No, if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well. And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast. […] I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there… I don’t know which way it is myself. You have not been a lot of help. So let’s just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group, very distinguished group like you guys, doesn’t know which way is which but another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.